Piano Bench Magazine Features Let's Play Music

It's always a great day when Let's Play Music teachers get to share the reasons why we love LPM with music educators who haven't heard of us before.  So, we were thrilled when Piano Bench Magazine featured us in the July, 2018 issue!

If you're a piano teacher, Piano Bench Magazine is a great resource for ideas, tips, and up-to-date news to help you succeed in every way.

You can get the July 2018 issue, and other issues, at this link. But if you're wondering what I wanted to tell the world's piano teachers about Let's Play Music, here's the entire message:

Every Piano Dilemma Solved

As a teacher, I’m on the prowl for methods and techniques that will really help my business blossom and increase my income. I’m also constantly looking to glean ideas for improving the quality and outcomes of my program. So, imagine the glorious day over a decade ago when I discovered an elusive gem that solved EVERY piano dilemma: I present to you Let’s Play Music. www.LetsPlayMusicSite.com

Let’s Play Music is a group class taught from a national 3-year curriculum, so let me start with that. Am I the only teacher who wondered how I could pay my mortgage with music lessons?

Teachers Eat, Too

With group classes, the student’s fee is $400- $600/ 30 weeks (depending on regional rates), and I have 6-8 students in each 45 minute class.  My first year teaching Let’s Play Music, I had 2 classes weekly, but in my most booming years of teaching, I swelled to 20 classes/week.  Instead of having 40 total private students in my 20 hours, I had 140 students in the same 20 hours. Dilemma solved. Know what else I recognized? The students love group classes. We have a spirit of fun collaboration. Kids learn better in the group! And everyone wants to join this group!

Balance Your Time

For those of you have 40 (or 140) students, you’re still wishing to give every student a carefully crafted, well-prepared, multi-faceted lesson every week. Oh, and it would be great if everything were taught through a clever game instead of a boring lecture. I know that’s what I dream of, but where can I find the prep time for all of that?

Enter the lesson plans provided by Let’s Play Music: Every lesson has been taught thousands of times, refined to provide both repetition and progress of new concepts all presented through GAMES and active fun. I never spend hours scouring the web looking for ways to make concepts fun. I flip open my manual (with the lessons planned to the minute) and I know my students will get 45 minutes PACKED with fast-paced, non-stop games. I prep my supplies and post a list of the activities and I’m ready for classes with minimal prep. Dilemma solved! A class cannot be this amazing without many people testing and refining it. I’m so relieved I don’t have to go it alone - I have the BEST lessons handed to me every week, and YES there is still room for me to add my personality and my twist when I want to.

Start Them Young

So, what about young students? I understand the sensitivity of young ears and minds; I want four- and five-year-olds to be ear training with chord progressions and relative pitch and melodic patterns and rhythm. I’ve read the studies on the importance of foundational music skills and I don’t want to waste these precious early years when kids intuitively absorb the concepts.  

I know they can be taught to understand how notes on a staff work, but their fingers are not ready for piano and they get bored if I make them sit for more than five minutes. What can I do with these young ones, when a 30-minute lesson on a bench would be a disaster? Let’s Play Music!

This is a 3-year program DESIGNED for students who start at age 4 or 5. Everything is skipping, clapping, puppetry, and games...or so the students would tell you. We have them reading melodic patterns, singing on pitch, using solfege, and playing chord progressions on an autoharp (AHA! No dexterity required!) all in the first few weeks.

We give them a whole YEAR of singing/ ear/ brain training with the autoharp and tone bells before they go on the piano...and then they are SO successful. Recruiting tip: Let’s Play Music  is the ONLY piano/musicianship program I can feel good sending a young one to. Dilemma solved! I’m never giving a 4-year-old a private lesson; it feels like a waste in comparison.

Way More than Piano Alone

But I care so much about REAL musicianship. I don’t want to leave anything out. It seems like no matter which lesson books I follow with piano students, I still need to supplement to cover composition and listening and ear-training. How can I make that work?

VOILA! Let’s Play Music includes classical music study, composition, dictation, ear training (chord progressions, intervals, melodic patterns, etc.), vocal training/ pitch matching/ singing, note reading, solfege, sight-reading, and more. YES, all through active, fun play.

I LOVE the days when my 4-year old classes (with no music playing) belt out the entire Verdi’s Triumphant March because they love it so much.

I LOVE the days when I give my 5-year-old students (who’ve been using pianos for 6 months) a song like “Old MacDonald” and tell them to choose chords for an accompaniment and then write them correctly in the bass clef.  

I LOVE the days when my 6-year-old students play two-handed on piano and can transpose between the keys of C, F, and G in a single song.

I LOVE the final recital when they perform their OWN complete piece (yes, for both hands and with ABA form and usually harmonized with I, IV, V, chords and complex rhythms and melodies.)  

MIND BLOWN and Dilemma Solved! I no longer worry that ANYTHING is missing from the Let’s Play Music curriculum. These students (and vicariously their parents) are getting the best musical training I can ever hope to provide.

By the way, please visit the blog and see videos of the fantastic compositions from students this year, or read dozens of articles explaining everything we do in Let’s Play Music.  www.MakingMusiciansLPM.blogspot.com

Okay, there is one big downside to Let’s Play Music… it ends. After 3 years (and an optional 4th bridge year), students graduate and hate to leave. You can choose to keep those 7-year-olds as private students and move them into your favorite piano lesson series, or you can send them on to other local piano teachers who will ADORE you for giving them prepared, ready-to-work students who can hear, improvise, and create! Students also go on to a multitude of other instruments and excel thanks to the amazing foundation provided by Let’s Play Music.

Please Share the Love

Will you consider joining the circle of piano excellence? Provide a fantastic foundation for many  4-year-olds of your city, then pass them on into the loving arms of excited private teachers. (or keep them! You choose!)

I’ve been teaching Let’s Play Music since 2006 and it has been a tremendous blessing for me, my husband, and our four children. That was my final dilemma...I wanted the VERY BEST for my own children. Dilemma solved! As a pure bonus, I have extreme fun playing in every class. I have never had such fun doing “work”.

Gina Weibel, M.S. is a teacher on Bainbridge Island, WA, and blogger for Let’s Play Music. She also teaches Sound Beginnings for preschoolers and a variety of other classes.

Learn more about Let’s Play Music and how you can become a teacher at our website:

www.LetsPlayMusicSite.com

Lindsey Judd: The First Teacher Has Impact

In the bustling suburbs of Chicago, IL, Let's Play Music is blooming in the studio of veteran teacher, Lindsey Judd.  Lindsey currently teaches Sound Beginnings,  Let's Play Music, private piano, and voice lessons: not a light load for a mom with a newborn (her 5th child) just arrived in 2014!

I Knew I Would Teach Someday

Let's Play Music students begin our program at age five.  That makes perfect sense to Lindsey; that's when she began lessons, too. Even back then, she felt the premonition that she, too, might one day become a music teacher.  "I think teaching was 'in me' from the start because all throughout my years of lessons, I took mental notes of what my teachers did: things I loved and things I didn't love. Now I'm finally incorporating all of what I've gleaned."

The First Teacher Has Impact

Lindsey told me about her first teaching gig.  "When I was fifteen, a family at church asked me to teach piano lessons to their two daughters. In one moment I was both honored and terrified! I remember sitting in the school cafeteria at lunchtime, a few hours before our first lesson together, feeling the weight of being the first one to introduce these girls to piano.  I knew that as a first teacher, I could shape their entire piano experience."  

Fortunately that first experience went very well and that first family (with 7 children) kept Lindsey as a teacher for them all.  She identified, early on, an important truth we hold dear at Let's Play Music: A child's first experience with music must be fun, playful, and loving.  The environment and attitude around the first experience determines much about the many years to follow for a young musician!

Just an example of the fun you might find in Lindsey's class: Baby Natalie made a guest appearance this week, in the role of Bunny as the students played 'Bunny's Birdhouse' on their keyboards.





Give Them Success 

Not all of Lindsey's early lessons were so successful. One very young student, petite and adorable, struggled with finger strength.  "She wanted to learn to play so badly! Her yearning was tangible.  It broke my heart to see her small, weak hands struggle to push the keys, week after week.  She eventually stopped lessons because it was too frustrating.  Years later, when I found the Let's Play Music curriculum, I remembered this student and wished I could have introduced her to LPM! It would have enabled her passion to flourish without the discouragement from having little fingers.  It breaks my heart to think that any child might associate music with disappointment. Let's Play Music was designed for student's to have the maximum positive musical experience, and I'm grateful for it."

We Teach Music...and Life Skills

Balancing a music studio and five young children isn't easy.  Lindsey let me know that Let's Play Music isn't just the job; it's helping her with the mothering! She says, "Teaching the LPM curriculum helped me rediscover the fun, spontaneous side of myself that got a little rundown in motherhood.  We now implement LPM methods in our home; for example, we create songs for routines, like our jazzy original tune 'Socks, shoes, coats and here we go!'. I can hum a few notes from this , my kids echo it back, and know what to do."

Lindsey hopes to share this love of music with her students- not just being able to read and perform music, but to use it in daily living, love it, and play with music at every opportunity. She told me, "Our lives have become a musical!  We burst into song when we are happy, and again when we're so frustrated that singing seems a better outlet than shouting." 

"Making up songs has become our family norm; on one trip home from the store, three children spontaneously starting singing to their crying baby sister to soothe her... in parts! Each separate, spontaneous lullaby was sweet, melodic, and rhythmically interesting, layered on the siblings' sweet voices.  The Let's Play Music curriculum isn't just helping these children with pitch and theory, they're also learning coping skills; they're also armed with music as a source of strength to use when life gets tough."

"These memories are the moments I hold on to and come back to when practicing seems hard or teaching lessons feels inconvenient." 

Lindsey holds a BFA in Music Dance Theater from Brigham Young University.  You can visit her studio website here or her classes in Skokie, IL.  It was a great pleasure to get to know her better!


- Gina Weibel, M.S. 

Katie Wilson: From Hating Lessons to Loving Music

Katie Wilson, M.S.

This week, I had the pleasure to get to know Let's Play Music and Sound Beginnings teacher, Katie Wilson.  Katie has been teaching in Midlothian, Virginia since 2012 and currently has 6 classes each week as well as several private piano students.

In addition to Let's Play Music teaching, Katie is the founder and co-director of the Young Midlothian Singers (a community children's choir for ages 7-13), founded in 2011.  She has also performed in adult choirs in both Washington DC and Richmond. 

Hated Lessons!?

Although Katie has been involved in music and performing for most of her life,  it wasn't always as joyful for her as it is today.  Katie says, "I took piano lessons as a child and hated almost every minute of it!  I loved when I could play songs that I chose and when I had a teacher who let me improvise and have fun." Too bad that was not the norm.

In retrospect, she wishes there had been Let's Play Music classes to nurture her when she was a child, encourage her composing and improvisation, and focus on learning to love the music she could create.  As an adult, she eventually returned to playing piano and composing and says, "I wish I had taken lessons longer and practiced more as a child."  

Most Important: Learn to Love It

Not surprisingly, Katie's dream for her students it to learn to LOVE music "whether they stick with piano or not."  She says, "My Let's Play Music classes give them the tools for understanding music and the confidence to pursue any musical avenue that appeals to them. I want music to be a part of their lives and their children's lives for generations to come!"  Katie has discovered that by teaching a love and understanding of music, not just the technical performance of it, her students get what she never quite achieved in her early lessons.

How Different Could It Be?

Midlothian is quite isolated from other Let's Play Music studios.  How did it make it's way into that area?  Katie explained that her best friend and mother of 4 Let's Play Music students gushed about how AMAZING the curriculum was and insisted that Katie should start teaching in her area.  "I was like, 'sure, yeah right, how different could it be from everything else out there?'"  As her friends children continued through the program, year-by-year, she continued to remind Katie that she NEEDED to become a teacher.

"I would say, 'yes, it sounds great' and then ignore her.  After years of nagging, I finally watched the demo video (watch here) on the website and was immediately hooked."

Katie has a Master's degree in developmental/ child psychology and learning theory.  She could see from the start how Let's Play Music was theoretically sound, with lessons building on each other and material presented in an age-appropriate way.  "On top of it all, it is SO FUN! I get to be crazy and silly and still teach sound foundational music theory. What could be better?"  She had finally found the program she'd wished for as a child, and applied that very week.

Teaching the Sneaky Way

Now Katie says the thing she loves most about teaching is being SNEAKY.  "I love that the students learn fun songs and don't realize how much theory is jam-packed into them. I also like to see the surprised look on parents' faces, especially very musical parents, when they see how cleverly we introduce tricky concepts."  Her clients were delighted when she used the feather and bulls-eye to demonstrate changing the rhythm of quarter notes to dotted-quarter and eighth notes, in a memorable, fun, and precise way.

When she's not teaching, Katie's four children are her greatest passion.  She homeschooled three of them up until high school, and still has a 5th grader at home.  She has successfully nurtured a love of music, theater, and performing in all of them, and says, "I spend a LOT of time in the car driving to and from rehearsals and shows. Keeping up with schedules is tricky as a single mom, but I love seeing them do things they are passionate about."

I had a great time getting to know Katie and hope you'll check out her classes if you happen to be in Virginia!

-Gina Weibel, M.S.

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